THE INTRACTABLE COMPLEXITY OF POVERTY
Jerry Harkins
Complexity characterizes the behavior of a system or model whose components interact in multiple ways and follow local rules, meaning there is no reasonable higher instruction to define the various possible interactions. The term is generally used to characterize something with many parts where those parts interact with each other in multiple ways, [creating a situation where a system has properties not present in its parts].
––Wikipedia
My friends, you will never encounter three more different entities than Donald Trump, the Pope and the New York Times. But they do share several important traits including ignorance and not excluding deception and delinquency when felt convenient. They also promote themselves as experts on an infinite variety of the world’s most complex problems. One claims to be a super genius, another says he is infallible. The Times, quite accurately, scoffs at both these upstarts because it knows that its editorial opinions and journalistic insights are essential to the working and very survival of the universe.
The Times used to issue upwards of eleven hundred editorial diktats every year. Recently it has cut this outpouring of sacred wisdom by more than half, filling the space with differently named opinion pieces like “editorial observer.” Even with the reduction, however, no one casts as wide a net as the Times. Is there an election or a revolution anywhere in the world? The Times knows how voters should exercise their franchise, how rioters should choose their targets and how a new junta must proceed. Are American universities trying to cope with their role in the slave trade? Easy, just ask the editors of The Times who will also instruct them as to their admissions policies, grading criteria and course content. Should museums be allowed to de-accession any of their holdings? Should Great Britain leave the European Union? Should statues of such as Robert E. Lee, Joe Paterno, and Christopher Columbus be removed from public sight? Must Central Park share the money it raises from private donors with parks in less favored neighborhoods? Did the fame of Elvis Presley have “…something to do with his music?” Was Mother Teresa a criminal psychopath? The Times has held forth on each of these questions and has issued definitive answers. The problem is not so much the substance of what is written which is always predictably left of center but the arrogance with which it is set forth to an undeserving world. Its favorite verb is "must." The President must do this, the Pope must do that. Its favorite conjunction is "but." Pandemic deaths are down, but... The President signed some bill, but... Although it issues hundreds of “corrections” every year, it has never, so far as I know, felt a need to retract an editorial opinion.
So it was not surprising that, on May 15, 2020, the newspaper of record revisited the eternal problem of homelessness with special reference to New York City. As is often the case, its solutions were long on ideology and short on history, economics and technology. It began with an analysis of the roots of the problem:
“Collectively, we are choosing to avert our eyes from the people who sleep where we walk. We have decided to live with the fact that some of our fellow Americans will die on the streets. 'There’s a cruelty here that I don’t think I’ve seen,' Leilani Farha, then the United Nations special rapporteur on adequate housing, was quoted as saying after a 2018 visit to Northern California.”
When they say “we are choosing,” they do not include themselves. They are pointing their fingers at their readers but they have enough residual sense not to make it obvious. The victims of our malevolence are invariably righteous, virtuous and deserving. They include:
“…graduates of foster care or the prison system, victims of domestic abuse or discrimination, veterans, and people with mental and physical disabilities. Some end up on the street because of addictions; some develop addictions because they are on the street.”
Note that all the factual statements are true even if the association of foster care and prisons is unfortunate, perhaps careless. Everything else is pure invention. We choose to avert our eyes. We have decided to live with the fact of death on the streets. Our behavior constitutes a cruelty never equaled in the experience of a UN rapporteur who appears to have led a charmed life. Note also that the authors are referring only to the 10% of the homeless who sleep on the streets and in subways and parks. Finally, note that the editorial pays little attention to solutions. It rails briefly against the government providing, “…more than $70 billion in tax breaks to homeowners, including a deduction for mortgage interest payments and a free pass on some capital gains from home sales. Let’s end homelessness instead of subsidizing mansions.”
Brilliant! The solution is to throw money at the problem, money we can take from undeserving homeowners. A little class antagonism is a small price to pay for…well, what exactly? Cities and states have tried a number of strategies without a great deal of success. I suspect the Times envisions building charming tree-shaded villages that provide their residents with a wide variety of support and services. Maybe they are based on B. F. Skinner’s vision of Walden Two. Which, I suppose, would be better than George Orwell’s Oceania.
In fact, the Times has no way of knowing my choices or decisions. It simply makes the worst possible assumptions about me (and you) and reports them as part of “all the news that’s fit to print.” I know this probably sounds like that man in the oval office bitching about fake news. But, no, the Times’ actual news reports are reliable if increasingly rare, simplistic, pompous and impractical. But it's their editorializing that is that is often more simplistic, pompous, impractical and also embarrassingly stupid.
The problem of homelessness is approximately ten times as large as and closely related to the number of people sleeping outdoors, at least in terms of how it can be addressed. It is always a result of other problems the roots of which vary by the distinct cohorts within the homeless population. First, consider the 60,000 people sleeping in shelters of various kinds. The precipitating cause for the African-Americans among them is probably racism. It may be post-traumatic stress syndrome for military veterans, domestic violence for many women and children and substance abuse for a diverse group of other people. Often enough, several of these causes are at work and it is hard to distinguish between cause and effect. But underneath the immediate causes, there is almost always the underlying condition of generational poverty and its concomitants.
Like homelessness, poverty is enmeshed in a dazzling array of social phenomena: discrimination, educational failure, poor housing, poor medical care, crime, violence, addiction, political corruption and so on and on. These are related to each other in ways we do not fully understand. We used to call it the “cycle of poverty” implying that they were links in a chain of causality. President Johnson’s War on Poverty was an attempt to figure out where that cycle was most vulnerable. It addressed some eighteen “links” and instituted experimental programs to discover the most promising ways to attack each and break the chain. Sargent Shriver was put in charge of a new Office of Economic Opportunity. It did a truly excellent job which was sadly truncated by the economic demands of the Vietnam War. But we learned a lot.
Unfortunately, much of what we learned was politically unpalatable. For example, the most important link in the chain turned out to be education. For one thing, the children of the poor were not prepared for the school experience and fell behind from the first day of kindergarten. The obvious solution seemed to be preschool education for children as young as two years. But that meant assuring children were well fed because you can’t learn on an empty stomach. On the same theory, it meant making sure kids who needed glasses got them and those who needed medication for asthma got and took it. Preschool would be an expensive long-term investment with no short-term payback for politicians. Americans are not good at either complexity or long-term anything. Like the Times, they prefer magic wands to incremental progress.
If you take the end of the Vietnam War as 1975, it took New York, arguably the nation’s most liberal city, more than 40 years to institute a preschool program for every child. The delay was due to political inertia and to opponents demanding a share of the educational budget for their own use. But it eventually came about and anecdotal evidence gives every indication that it is working wonders in New York. But there is still a long way to go. We need to focus more resources on education at all levels, particularly on vocational high schools, community colleges and lifetime learning. We need to assure college graduates that they won’t be burdened with crippling debt for the decades in which they will start families and purchase homes. These are urgent problems but they are also awesomely complex. Complexity itself is a complex subject.
In 1969, Beryl L. Crowe of Oregon State University published an article in which she claimed, “There has developed in the contemporary natural sciences a recognition that there is subset of problems, such as population, atomic war, environmental corruption, and the recovery of a livable urban environment, for which there are no technical solutions.” [1] She continued that a similar recognition was emerging among social scientists about certain “current political problems” and she gave the identical examples. The article was and remains controversial but might have been less so had she focused on different examples such as poverty, racism and income equity which are more complex and difficult to quantify than those she chose. Thus, global warming can be measured but measuring racism is much more difficult. Even poverty cannot be easily measured because it has many subjective indicators. Lyndon Johnson, who grew up in Stonewall, Texas on the banks of the Pedernales River, once said, “We were poor but we didn’t know we were.”
Every program a government considers, whether simple or convoluted, competes with every other program and all programs have their constituencies. Thus, the budgetary process requires the balancing of incommensurables: guns versus butter in the metaphor of economists. The scales used to weigh programs are often devoid of substantive programmatic goals, relying instead on political considerations. Homeless people weigh very little in such a calculus and those who do advocate for them generally do so from a moral perspective rather than an economic one. Which is exactly what the Times is doing when it castigates us for supposedly choosing to ignore the moral imperative that seems so obvious to its editors.
Complexity theory was first developed in the middle of the nineteenth century to deal with problems in the natural sciences that dealt in variables that were inherently imprecise or vague. For example, the slightly erratic behavior of steam engines made them useless in precision operations. Traditional or Aristotelian logic requires that variables be fully true or fully false and cannot cope with inconstancy. Mathematicians and philosophers began to develop alternative logics including what is now known as fuzzy logic which many see as intellectually unsatisfying but which “works” in a wide variety of scientific and engineering contexts. It is not clear that any current alternative logic could be applied to major social problems but it appears to have been used with some success in a variety of social media and related applications. In the meantime, we have to re-think the role of ideology in informing policy.
Every community needs a widely shared social contract which is a polite way of referring to a common ideology. In America, that need has been met by the opening sentences of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address and perhaps a small number of other statements. [2] The ideas –– or self-evident truths –– encapsulated in them have not been fulfilled but it would be hard to argue that progress has not been made. Throughout our history, conflicts have arisen over whether and how different ideas fit into our ideology but in recent decades we have witnessed the so-called “culture wars” which question whether the ideas themselves are valid. Perhaps the most threatening of these battles have been fought over civil rights and our commitment to it. When the Supreme Court ruled that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal, [3] it set off decades of turmoil including copious bloodshed and a third party presidential campaign that captured five states and 13.5% of the vote for a racist candidate. It also led to the creation of the Republican Party’s “southern strategy” in 1970 which has permeated the party’s philosophy ever since.
Ideology is not sacred scripture. It evolves over time, often in fundamental ways. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” Does this mean all males but not females? Or is it the generic mankind, human beings? Does it include people held in slavery and, if so, do slaves enjoy the unalienable right to the liberty endowed to them by their creator? On July 4, 1776, almost no one thought women had or should have rights equal to those of men. When the Constitution was adopted in 1789, slaves were counted as three-fifths of a white person. No one thought they had a right to vote because they were thought to be inferior and they were not citizens. The Supreme Court explicitly ruled that they were not and could not be citizens in the Dred Scott decision of 1857. [4] The Fourteenth Amendment changed that ideology in 1868 but change at the polling place came at a snail’s pace and is still incomplete. Ideology has limits especially in the arena of political decision making.
In today’s world, the consensus of American opinion rejects slavery and patriarchy at least in theory and in public discourse, both of which have histories dating to the dawn of civilization. As do poverty and homelessness which received little attention simply because they were part of the way the world had always been. There were occasional revolts against the conditions and treatment of the poor. The Peasants’ Revolt in fourteenth century brought about the end of serfdom in England. Shays’ Rebellion in 1786 was a military failure but achieved several of its economic aims including debt relief and tax reforms demanded by the impoverished veterans who led it. (It also gave rise to one of Thomas Jefferson’s less enlightened remarks, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
Poverty as a social concern began to attract support from a generation of urban reformers in the late nineteenth century, people like Jacob Riis, Henry George, Walter Rauschenbusch, Ed McGlynn, Jane Addams and Dorothy Day. Riis’s book, How the Other Half Lives, influenced many Americans including Theodore Roosevelt and laid the foundations of public policy that persisted until the 1960’s. Success, however, was elusive. For one thing, the housing provided by densely clustered high rise apartment houses was an improvement over the tenements but the “projects” were an enormous gamble that created more problems than they solved.
At present, New York is not a well-managed city. Even a great manager like Michael Bloomberg was not able to cut through the ideological battles that occur every time a new policy initiative is proposed. Among recent mayors, Bloomberg was an exception; most have been little more than ideologues. It may be that politics American style is not an effective way to address complex problems. The challenge to find ways to bring empiricism into our decision making is as complex as our problems.
Subsequently
Twenty-four days after calling on the city to spend a vast but unspecified amount of money on the homelessness problem, the Times ran an editorial insisting it cut its projected post-covid budgetary deficit of more than $7 billion by a huge but unspecified amount. It did claim the police budget could be cut by $1 billion or 16%. The education budget could be slashed by more than $966 million. The information technology budget could be cut by $29 million. The total cuts come to one billion nine hundred sixty-six dollars or 28% of the deficit. Does anybody at the Times read this stuff before sending it to the printer?
[1] Beryl L. Crowe, “The Tragedy of the Commons Revisited,” Science, 166:3909, pp. 1103-1107, 28 November, 1969.
[2] Of particular relevance to this essay is the freedom from want asserted by President Franklin Roosevelt in his State of the Union Address in 1941. It was later adopted by the United Nations as Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
